The goal of the Spectre project is to develop tools for private financial transactions and private communication. Unlike other projects, we're not only focusing on the "private transactions" part, that is sending money anonymously, but take a more holistic approach to protect the user's privacy. All communication is happening exclusively on the Tor network. Our goal is to establish a private payment ecosystem using mobile phones, similar to cash and inspired by Hawala and Localbitcoins. The mobile app will feature a chat, a wallet and a web of trust system to find good peers, all running over the Tor network to hide the user's locations. The name of the app will be "Spectre Cash". To lay a solid foundation for this great vision, we're also aiming at improving and innovating on the basic cryptocurrency technology and making Spectre a solid and private general-purpose currency.

History

SpectreCoin was created in 2016 to improve on the concept of ShadowCash (SDC). The ICO happened during a 3 month period from October 2016 to early January 2017. The goal was to add Tor integration to the ShadowCash codebase, and further extend the concept of an anonymous currency to target remittances via a mobile application, using a system inspired by Hawala. To release the ICO funds through an escrow, the Tor integration part was completed and submitted a few days after the ICO had ended.

Unfortunately, only few funds could be acquired during ICO, totaling to ~17 BTC (~16,000 USD at that time). The reason for this was unclear, part of it could be a bad timing and some people calling it a scam or "ShadowCash clone" repeatedly. Still as planned, the entirety of 20 Mio. XSPEC was proportionally distributed to the participating investors, resulting in an astonishing ICO price of only 83 sat on average (most investors paid more like 90 sat per coin, due to a bonus system to benefit early birds during ICO). As soon as the Tor integration was submitted and the coin was listed on exchanges, the coin was listed at a more realistic price of 1000-2000 sat, leading to a very high initial return for ICO investors.

Since April 2017, the ShadowCash project has been abandoned for a new project of the ShadowCash developers called Particl, making Spectre completely stand on its own two feet.

During summer 2017, Spectrecoin founder mandica started facing serious health issues and finally handed over the project leadership to lead developer jbg, who is now developing the coin.

On Aug 9, 2017, Spectrecoin version 1.3.0 was released by jbg. This update fixed a lot of issues in the old codebase, updated Tor, included a 32-bit binary for Windows and added support for the OBFS4 obfuscation protocol. Also, a new website was created on https://spectreproject.io/ with updated information and a new, clean design to display the philosophy of the new project leadership.

From Aug 20 to Aug 25, 2017, the community raised ~37,500 XSPEC and 1 BTC (which was about ~$4000 USD at that time) to fund development, which allowed jbg to quit his job and work as a full-time developer for Spectre.

Sept 10, 2017, an ex-colleague of jbg, @brycel, joined the project as a cryptographer in order to improve the ring signature mechanism, so that it could be used as the default transaction mechanism in future versions instead of being optional.

Sept 11, 2017, wallet version 1.3.1 was released by jbg, which fixed a visual bug in previous wallet versions that had become known as the infamous zero-balance bug, because it made the users balance appear as zero. Furthermore, this release was the first to include a binary for Apple MacOS. A change to the stealth transaction mechanism was introduced so that the wallet allows for non-anonymous ring signatures with only 1 or 2 members. The reason for this was that at that stage, the network often did not have enough participants for ring signatures to do a full ring signature transaction. On the same day, version 1.3.2 was released that fixes a minor bug in version 1.3.1.

Sept 12, 2017, version 1.3.3 was released, which fixes some further GUI issues, and brings faster wallet startup and sync performance.

Current development

The current development is about removing QtWebkit dependencies in the Qt wallet and migrating to Qt5. Furthermore, the ring signature mechanism is being evaluated, documented and improved.

Tor integration

Many cryptocurrencies today support connecting your wallet to other nodes on the network through Tor in some way. With these coins, other nodes are still addressed by their IP address, but each user has the choice to hide his IP address by routing his traffic through several hops on the Tor network, including one entry and one exit node. Such a scheme has several downsides. For example, the exit node can read the unencrypted traffic that goes from a node that uses Tor (A), to a node that doesn't use Tor (B), and can act as a man-in-the-middle. Furthermore, exit nodes could collaborate and prevent A (or any cryptocurrency user that tries to use Tor) from doing transactions altogether. Finally, if not every coin node uses Tor, an attacker could analyse the network structure at the unprotected nodes and maybe use timing analysis attacks or correlation attacks to deanonymize nodes that are routing through Tor.

In Spectre, all nodes on the network are operating as Tor hidden services. They are not addressed by their IP address, but by their .onion address which encodes a public key used for traffic encryption along with a way to find a route to that node. No exit nodes are involved, and at any point in time, the communication between two nodes is fully encrypted. Spectrecoin comes bundled with the latest Tor software that has been included without any functional changes. It is not possible to connect to the Spectre network without using Tor, as all nodes are only reachable via their hidden service address. No real IP addresses are known to any network participant except for their own, and it is infeasible for an attacker to analyze the network structure or censor the network.

OBFS4

Spectre has inbuilt support for OBFS4 to use it with Tor Pluggable Transports. OBFS4 is an obfuscation protocol that hides the nature of the traffic that goes through it. By incorporating OBFS4, it is possible to use Spectre even in countries where access to the Tor network is censored, like China or Iran. It is currently the recommended pluggable transport of the Tor project. More info can be found on the Pluggable Transports page of the Tor website.

Comparison with other coins

In this section we will answer the common question of "How does Spectre compare to X?", where X is one of the following coins.

Cloak seems to also target applications sending data between each other via the Cloak network, while Spectre focuses on being simply a currency.

While CloakCoin has its own onion routing network, Spectre is part of the official Tor network. This makes Spectre more anonymous (as there are much more nodes participating in the network), and more difficult to censor.

Cloak's ENIGMA protocol seems to be based on mixing, whereas Spectre uses untraceable ring signatures that we find to be more efficient and also more secure: Ring signatures (using private fixed-size tokens) are information-theoretically anonymous, while mixed transactions could possibly be prone to correlation attacks and malicious nodes.

All funds are visible on the blockchain, whereas in Spectre, funds that are stored as private balance (tokens for ring signatures) are not publicly visible.

DeepOnion

DeepOnion does not offer transaction privacy, all transactions are publicly visible. In addition, Spectre also supports stealth addresses and ring signatures for private sending and receiving of coins.

Users are able to send encrypted messages using DeepOnion, this does not quite work with Spectre yet, although we will be adding that feature.

DeepOnion is a marketing-airdrop scheme on Bitcointalk, whereas Spectre had a plain ICO.

The DeepOnion dev holds more than 50% of the coins at this point, whereas the Spectre devs only hold about 1-2% together. Therefore, DeepOnion must be seen as being completely centralized at this point, which makes it zero value, whereas Spectre is completely decentralized.

The DeepOnion dev is rich because he owns >50% of the coin supply of DeepOnion, whereas the Spectre devs are funded by the community.

The Spectre project has a vision that goes beyond private transactions and targets to establish a private payment ecosystem similar to cash, whereas DeepOnion does not seem to have any further goals beyond having an anonymous currency.

Monero

Monero is a much bigger project than Spectre and has a lot more devs, but also a much higher price. So Spectre has bigger potential to grow.

Monero uses Proof-of-Work, Spectre uses Proof-of-Stake.

The Monero wallet is mature and stable, while there are still some bugs in Spectre.

In Monero, you can send money anonymously, while this does not quite work with Spectre yet, because there are too few "tokens" available for making a ring-signature. We want to make Spectre Tokens (for ring signatures) the default in future versions, which should solve this problem.

Spectre has a rich list, while Monero does not. This comes from the fact that Spectrecoin's anonymity is an add-on to normal Bitcoin-like operation at this point, so anonymity (and storing coins as tokens instead of on a public address) is optional in Spectre. We want to make it the default in future versions. Spectre coins that are stored as "private balance" in the wallet are not visible in the block explorer.

Spectre has native Tor integration and all nodes run as hidden services. Monero plans to add an I2P implementation called "Kovri", but it's not the default for Monero yet. Monero can also run via Tor, but only using it as a proxy that uses Tor exit nodes, which comes with some problems (see the Tor integration section).

The goals and vision of Spectre and Monero are different.

In a Twitter post [1], "fluffpony" (the Monero project leader) noted that using Tor hidden services in Spectre might be susceptible to isolation attacks because .onion address are costless to create. This problem is mitigated in Spectre because the onion addresses used to join the Spectre network have certain requirements, which requires the user to "mine" for a suitable Tor public key first before joining the network. Also, like most Bitcoin-based wallets, Spectre has sophisticated security mechanisms for node selection, so running an isolation attack is not so simple.

Exchanges

You can use exchanges to buy and sell Spectre coins (XSPEC) for Bitcoin (BTC). They are free to use, you just need to make an account and deposit some BTC to the site. You need to get Bitcoin from somewhere else, first. A list of exchanges that support Spectre can be found here: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/spectrecoin/#markets

Bigger exchanges like Bittrex and Poloniex usually decide on their own which coins they want to add, there is no way to force them or pay them to list XSPEC.

After you bought XSPEC from one of the exchanges, you should transfer them to your wallet. See the Download section below. Sending coins to someone else directly from an exchange does NOT give you the same anonymity guarantees as if you use the standalone wallet!

Download

Windows

The download links are available from the official website or from Github. Please make sure to check the SHA256 sum after downloading the file, to make sure you have got the right file! There are different ways to check the SHA256 sum:

If you have 7-zip installed (a very neat archive extractor), you can check the SHA256 sum using a context menu entry called "CRC SHA". (We would recommend you to install 7-zip, as it is a very useful utility anyway! ;))

If you are command-line savvy, you can use the Windows command "CertUtil -hashfile pathToFileToCheck SHA256".

Please do not download the wallet from other sources than the official ones!

Linux

If you are using GNU/Linux, please compile the software on your own system using the instructions found in the Github repository. You can also ask for help in Slack if needed (see "Links" below).

Code names

Starting with wallet version 1.3, the Spectre community started giving code names to releases, based on the most common reactions from newbies using the wallet or problems people were experiencing, written in intentionally broken English. Version 1.3 was named "Why my balance is zero?", which refers to a bug in the user interface that was left over from the old ShadowCash code and leads to the displayed balance not being updated after the start of the wallet, making it appear as "0.00". This bug was solved with wallet update 1.3.1.